Simple Things
by Lecherous Fever
Summary: In the moment just before her name comes to his lips, he knows something isn't right. But it's all he has. / Sora-centric; CoM-era. An old two-parter, from the POV of Naminé and Sora as he stalks the halls of Castle Oblivion.


Her white page quickly fills with marks of differing colours and lengths, seemingly formative of nothing until her hands are nearly finished skating over their canvas. Lately, she has been drawing much the same thing – that is to say, much the same person. A crayon box filled with a spectrum that even the most serious, the most _feeling_ of artists would envy, but it is the obnoxiously bright primary colours - _fakeredfakebluefakeyellow -_ and a simple brown which betray the most use.

The girl steals the smallest of smiles as traitorous tears make a slow descent from her empty blue eyes. They leap to the page, a suicide in miniature, one that she herself could never hope to achieve. Naminé's small hands grip the edges of her indifferent sketchbook as she looks into the crayoned eyes of the hero she will have to destroy.

She is nothing, yet the tears dare to fall from her eyes. She is nothing, yet something within her dares to ache any, _every_ time she draws herself a pale imitation of the intense blue eyes and shock of brown hair. She is nothing. Naminé does not exist, not at all; and she knows it.

_So how... what is this if not pain?_

Carefully, she turns the page, unsoaked teardrops rolling downwards over scorings of waxy crayon as it goes. Taking a breath to steady herself and wiping away the stray tears from her face, Naminé settles a new blank page and casts herself into the heart she's made a mess of. She concentrates and slowly discards fragments of memories, almost small enough to escape notice of absence, one by one, just a little at a time. When she dives into his recollections like this, she wonders how Sora – pacing only a few floors beneath her own feet and trying to make sense of the chaos his memory has become – could possibly be oblivious. A part of her expects him to just _know_, to come storming at her with his soul and his spirit and himself, and demand she put things right. Sometimes, she even wishes it were so.

Soon, another outline joins the one she's so used to sketching out. She isn't sure if she should laugh or cry, or do neither of the two. She's in someone's heart, finally – _his_, of all people. Naminé is there... but it's a lie. And she won't ever forget it.

_Today, Sora... today, you will know my name._

* * *

Stalking corridor after identical corridor has Sora thinking maybe the place was built with him in mind. Every room he enters in Castle Oblivion looks just like the last, save for those born of his memory's reconstruction. _Memory is the keyword_, his mind supplies. And now, he feels like his own is useless,

-_"Your memory is a train wreck."-_

like he has every part of the puzzle, but no way of connecting them in a way that makes any sort of sense. There are pieces he can grasp when he reaches for them, but he can't seem to hold them all together. They slip through his fingers like water, ever elusive and not to be understood, all but forgotten once they're no longer attainable.

Each room of Oblivion is pure white. White stretches of walls, white expanses of floors, white skies of ceiling, and white litterings of furniture, in the rooms which are gifted with it. Sora finds himself thinking of it like boxed snow. All this brightness... it might have been beautiful elsewhere, but here it is unendingly artificial. Empty. For the briefest of seconds, he is looking at a photographic remnant of his old bedroom back on Destiny Islands. Sora smirks to himself, stopping short of laughing outright, at the onslaught of the sudden childish urge to taint the walls with nonsensical lashings of crayon or felt-tip, running on into each seamless corridor until the rooms don't seem quite so hollow anymore. Markings, pictures on the walls. The thought reminds him of a place they -_who?-_ used to have on their islet. Sora's pretty sure they named it 'The Secret Place', but he could be wrong.

_The cave was always a good shelter from the brightness. Sometimes it was too much, and he was prone to sleeping on sun-warmed sand, but in here it was cool. In here he was safe, and alone. Mostly alone. One day she -_who is she?-_ came in to find him chipping her image into the wall, scraping away at the stone. A white girl. A girl in white..._

In the moment just before her name comes to his lips, he knows something isn't right. But it's all he has.

_Naminé..._

* * *

_**AN: **I'm in the process of going through some old fics I wrote and never published, or considered "finished". But, like the great tutor/author (and all-round great person) Gerard Donovan likes to tell us - never end a story, simply stop. So I'm revising some old things and, yeah, just stopping. What even is plot anyway? :P_

_In the case of this one, the original was scribbled in the back of a GCSE exercise book [what feels like] a million years ago. I'm hoping some of this stuff is as salvageable as I want it to be... DX_


End file.
